The Triumph of Life

24 Years Later

                                Swift as a spirit hastening to his task,
                                Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
                                Rejoicing in his splendor, and the mask
                                Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth-

                                                          Fugue

                                              Sydney, Australia 1999     
         Twenty four years later, Juliette accepted an invitation to return to the Sydney conservatorium of music for the student graduation concert with performances by final year students- as she had done. The performance pieces would be Alban Berg’s String quartet, titled ‘The Lyric Suit’, performed by the conservatorium’s student quartet, who were all final year students; along with a song cycle based on Shelley’s poem The Mask of Anarchy, by Alastor Swann, the lesser-known Australian composer.  Juliette, as a former student had been invited to attend the concert by her old friend Professor Julius Lissitzki, head of composition at the conservatorium; an oddly handsome man whose oblique face, tufts of gray hair and gentle accent gave away his European origins. Professor Lissitzki studied with Bela Bartok when Bartok conducted research into ethnic music at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
         The beautiful campus backed onto the Botanical Gardens in the center of the city. The students felt fortunate to sit on the grounds of a centuries old botanical garden.
         Now, as a middle-aged woman, Juliette lived a life far removed from her youth; this was a good thing in her mind. What remained, however, from her youth, was a dogged determination not to succumb to the fetid world of complacent mediocrities, as she called it- her fire had not died (This was the reality that Juliette could not flee from. She grew from that young, rebellious woman with blood-red hair and angel wings, who threw away her music career, into a mellow introverted spirit- but the passion in the bellows of the intellect never fades in some individuals, she would later admit). There existed one period in her youth that she held up to the lamp of reason with a sense of wonder and gratitude, the type that stays with one all their life.
         She arrived early that afternoon to meet-n-greet. Professor Lissitzky took her for a walk in the Gardens, down to Farm Cove and back- a twenty-minute leisurely stroll. They spoke of her graduation and the mystical sense of accomplishment that day, when she performed against the odds, the odds of a life full of exhilaration and despair; against the death of her friend and mentor, against her anger and the vodka that tamed it. The Professor joked about that day and how she had just finished her shift at the post office, delivering mail on the red post bike, before her performance. They joke about the obvious- the mail must get through. Two decades earlier, her soul did not know such humor.
         The gardens ran down to the edge of Sydney harbor, and merged with Lady Macquarie’s chair, a point of land extending into the harbor. Elevated a hundred feet above the water, it afforded beautiful views of the coat hanger, the colloquial name for the bridge and the white sails of the Opera House. The chair, as it is known to locals, includes a single lane road that winds along to a small parking area, allowing tourist buses to congest and infuriate car drivers as they all aim to view the ferries, the sail boats, the cruise ships and the small military ships that ceaselessly congest the dark green waters.  At the entrance to the road to the gardens, located in a Greco-Roman architectural building, lived the Art Gallery of New South Wales; a spiritual escape for music students with the interesting visual array of contemporary and classic art works.
          Over the road from this was a large undulating park called the Domain backing onto Saint Mary’s cathedral the largest gothic cathedral in Sydney, which lay across the road from Hyde Park, a beautifully wooded park, lively with squirrels and other creatures in the center of a ceaseless city.
         The entire green space encompasses a haven away from the noise, the odor and the anxiety of the modern metropolis. The Art Gallery, the Gardens, the Chair, the Conservatorium, all contained paths that lead down to Benalong Point where the famous sails of the Opera House loomed large over the water. Juliette and fellow students wandered the immediate environs drawing inspiration and meditation from the gardens, occasionally having lunch at the botanical gardens cafe or the art gallery cafe.
          Juliette studied the music of both composers, Berg and Swann; although, Alastor Swann’s music had been largely ignored when he was alive –the forties, fifties and sixties- as this was a period that gave rise to zealous Marxism in response to the expansionist American Empire, which in turn gave rise to McCarthyism. Like Shostakovich in the Soviet Union, Alastor Swann’s music was effectively excluded and ignored as he supported anti-imperialist, Marxist causes. He hailed the Hydrogen bomb, pioneered by the Hungarian-American Edward Teller and the atom bomb that America dropped on Japan, as the apotheosis of evil, the deepest depravity and the closest humans have come to the de Maistre effect. Composing modernist music that spoke to this evil found few supporters. Juliette did find, however, great spiritual solace in the music of modernist composers and the social clique that supported them.
          She remembered her time as a student, the familiar hallways, how they once echoed to the frivolity of youthful arrogance and exuberance, the very essence of discovery. She remembered Eamon de Valera, a crazy Irishman born in Australia to Irish and British parents. He was a fine combination of artistic zeal and madness wrapped in the sharpest wit and humor. He thought he was Lenny Bruce and would engage anyone in an infamous Lenny Bruce routine without his or her knowledge. One day he fooled the university cafeteria staff by asking if they were going to stock the new ice cream, called ‘Thank You Mask Man!’ –always pronounced with an exclamation regardless of how many times you said it in succession. He fooled the elderly women for two long weeks, each day asking if the ice cream had arrived, and how he yearned for one after seeing the television commercial. The poor unsuspecting women would ask the manager and receive a strange look in return. The ice cream never arrived.
          Eamon de Valera was ruggedly Irish looking with that handsome mug only a mother or Republican could love. Although he did charm the most attractive, curly, blonde-haired girl by the name of March Suppleness into an embarrassing position in Farm Cove one evening. March was the stage name for her juggling and contortion act while playing the harmonica. Although, rumors abound that she was also an accomplished pianist.
         Life had traveled on since Juliette left the conservatorium and she lost contact with her fellow students. Eamon played bit parts as typecast villains in small films, while March engaged her talents dressed as cartoon characters, sweating inside furry costumes on a Gold Coast theme park.
         Juliette practically forgot about that period of her life. The somber and dull years of her thirties would leave that time behind, like a train leaving the station, slow and rhythmical; building speed the further removed it became. Years went by where she totally forgot her twenties. What she saw as the trivialities of modern Western culture had nothing to offer Juliette; a culture that revolved around drinking as an opiate to mask the individuals impotence in the face of a selfish civilization. The cheap thrills of Hollywood’s soporific outpourings that served the same purpose and the far flung absence from any sense of connection to Nature were the lowest common denominator of what civilization had to offer, she lamented.
         She never forgot, however, the passion of discovery when a piece of music clicked with her own intuitive sense of splendor & spiritual essence, the wonder that only youth brings to intellectual discovery. She called it her period of glorious inexplicability. A time in her life when she found the naked beauty of existence speaking to her in volumes that were not found in any library, the splendor that allowed her to sail far and above all that frail stuff that was- or would be; the splendor that is frequently hidden within music, art, politics, love and humor.
         During her friendship with Alastor Swann, she discovered Shelley’s poems; Philip Glass’ music; the tragedies of Dostoyevski; the political evil of United States foreign policy in Latin America; the design theories of the Bauhaus; the creativity that emerged from the Jewish culture; the philosophy of quantum theory and a respect for theosophical thinking; in short, the obsessions that have driven people for centuries to go beyond the mediocre, the sallow herd mentality as she called it. ‘Give me a reason worth living for, and a reason worth dying for.’ She often said to people who worshiped the God of mass psychology: the subtle conditioning by the socio-political opiate of television and Sunday school.
         As she drifted further from the respectable cultural activity of putting ones self through university, marrying, having a family and other torments; as she saw it - obedient to comfortable traditions of western thought and culture - she sensed a growing vacuum that drew out an innermost thirst for intellectual discourse with similar sentient beings; it was a creature with like-minded sensibilities that eluded her. She missed reason and understanding as well as zest and compassion for life, the ideals that she knew in her student days, the ideals she experienced in an unusual friendship with an old man she met while delivering mail to supplement her student income.